The conventional Indian maiden besieged the bachelor two-thirds of our expedition with all the wiles that could be embodied in a comely and clean-calicoed charmer up in the twenties, who finally bore away from the Betsy’s private stores a fan of stunning colors and other odds and ends of a St. Paul notion-store; while the guileless commander of the Hattie, whose cumulative years should have taught him better, and whose thinly-clad brain-shelter and disreputable attempt at sailor costume should have blunted all feminine javelins, surrendered to the ugliest old septuagenarian in the village, and sent her heart away rejoicing in the ownership of a policeman’s whistle courted by her leering eyes and already smirched by her dirty lips, together with a stock of tea, crackers and bacon for which her expanded corporosity evinced no imminent need.  At last rid of our importunate acquaintances, we turned in for a sleep, which we resolved should be broken at the first moment, dark or light, when we might cross the lake.  Before daylight the Betsy’s resonant call awoke us, and in the earliest gray we paddled out upon a heavy but not foaming sea, and after two and a half hours of monotonous splashing in the trough of the waves landed for breakfast on the eastern shore, whence we crossed a lovely bay and passed out once more upon the river.

A mile on our way we came to the prettiest of the many Indian burying-grounds which we saw now and then.  Formerly, the Indians deposited their dead upon rude scaffolds well up in the air.  Now they seek high ground and place the bodies of the departed in shallow graves, over which they build little wooden houses a foot or two high with gabled roofs, and mark each with a white flag raised upon a pole a few feet above the sleeper’s head.  In this neighborhood we inquired of a stalwart brave concerning our proximity to a portage by means of which a short walk over to a small lake near the head of Ball Club Lake and a pull of six miles down the latter would bring us out again into the river, and save a tedious voyage of twenty-five to thirty miles through a broad savanna.  The Indian in his old birch canoe joined our fleet, and led us to the beginning of the portage near the foot of Little Winnipeg Lake.  We had carried two canoes and all the baggage over to the water on the other side of a sandy ridge, leaving only the Kleiner Fritz to be brought, when our guide and packer, with a preliminary grunt, said “Money?” inquiring how much we intended to pay him.  He had worked hard for four hours, for which we tried to tell him that we should pay him one dollar when he should bring over the remaining canoe; but we could not make him understand what a dollar was.  We then laid down, one after another, four silver quarter-dollars and two bars of tobacco; whereupon he gave a satisfied grunt and an affirmative nod, disappeared in the forest, and in less than an hour returned with the Fritz upon his steaming shoulders, having covered more than three miles in the round trip.